No God exists, author argues
Published 9:00 pm Friday, November 3, 2006
Publicists call Britain’s Richard Dawkins “the world’s most prominent atheist.” Superlatives aside, he’s certainly the leader among scientists who believe Darwin’s evolution theory has exterminated any possibility that God exists.
Dawkins, a take-no-prisoners type, treats faith as a lethal disease and billions of believers as rather stupid.
He thinks it’s arguable that sexual molestation is less damaging to children than religious training, yet society accepts “the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents.”
Dawkins despises Judaism’s biblical God: “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
He’s friendlier toward the teachings of Jesus – “if he existed, or whoever wrote his script if he didn’t.” However, belief that Jesus died for the sins of the world is a “repellent doctrine,” he thinks; Christians forever focus on “sin sin sin sin sin sin sin.”
So Dawkins preaches in “The God Delusion” (Houghton Mifflin), which has its moments but counts as a disappointment. A carefully wrought atheistic manifesto for popular audiences would be worthwhile, but Dawkins’ effort is marred by omissions, fluffs, fuzzy generalizations and snarky asides.
Dawkins could have seriously explored the thinking of atheists such as the late J.L. Mackie or William Rowe and of God-defenders including Oxford University colleagues Robert M. Adams, Richard Swinburne and former atheist Alister McGrath; or the titan of theism, America’s Alvin Plantinga.
By coincidence, “Delusion” appears alongside another scientist’s popular treatment, “The Language of God” (Free Press) by Francis Collins, director of the international Human Genome Project, who explains his pilgrimage from atheism to evangelicalism.
Collins thinks it’s improbable that the cosmos occurred by mere happenstance, since biology is incredibly complex and life couldn’t exist at all if the laws of physics were slightly different. It’s a Goldilocks universe, Dawkins acknowledges, neither too much nor too little but just right.
Here, Dawkins originates “the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit,” inspired by astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle. Hoyle remarked that the odds of life on Earth occurring through unguided evolution are the equivalent of a hurricane sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a jumbo jet.
Dawkins turns this inside out: “Any God capable of designing a universe, carefully and foresightedly tuned to lead to our evolution, must be a supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide.”
“It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable” than the improbable cosmos we actually inhabit, he concludes, and since the simplest explanation is best “there almost certainly is no God.” (Both sides say total, scientific-style proof for or against God is impossible.)
Having dismissed any need for God as designer of the universe, Dawkins zips through other arguments:
* Without God, how do we explain humanity’s universal sense of morality? That question coaxed Collins toward faith, but Dawkins thinks some evolutionary mechanism operates.
* How do we explain beauty apart from God? Dawkins says we can appreciate Bach or Michelangelo without believing God inspired them.
* Widespread spiritual experience? He says our minds play tricks on us.
* Dawkins also pooh-poohs the classical proofs of Thomas Aquinas – for instance, that every effect has a prior cause so the ultimate cause must be God.
Related and notable:
* Sam Harris, whose best-selling “The End of Faith” had Dawkins-style flaws, pursues matters in the brief “Letter to a Christian Nation” (Knopf).
* Jewish journalist Pamela Winnick critiques scientific efforts to supplant faith in “A Jealous God: Science’s Crusade Against Religion” (Nelson Current).
